I have three friends – who I’ll call AJ, Madd and Potter, since those are essentially their names – with whom I play games online most Sunday evenings. It’s a nice way to stay in touch and it’s a lot of fun. They’re very patient with how bad I am at PUBG.

Over the last few months we’ve been playing Vigor, a free to play “shoot ‘n loot” from Bohemia Interactive. Bohemia are well-known for the ArmA series, which is a tactical military shooter notorious for its realism. Vigor shares some of its approach to weapon handling – running and gunning will not go well for you – but is a round-based game where cautious, paranoid scavenging is as viable and important a strategy as hunting for other players.

Sadly, Vigor does not sport four-player co-op play. This makes sense, as such a setup would run counter to its core design. At most you can take one friend into a match: someone to watch your back while you scavenge.

It is technically possible to get into a game with more friends than this. If you and three friends team up, and the two hosts don’t have too much lag between them, and they get the timing on an attempt to join a match just right, there’s a possibility you’ll load into the same map.

To do this with the intent to cooperate is a dangerous technique even if you succeed. Your friends look just like every other potentially hostile player. Communication and caution are essential if you’re to try this approach. But if you succeed the potential rewards are great. You can take your time scavenging and really clean up a map, and even make a strong push for the game’s greatest rewards.

Good communication is key. When we found ourselves in the same lobby for a match on Batterie Draug, a small 8-player map, we knew this. Madd and I spawned on the map’s southern edge, near the map’s locked safe – the second best loot point but also a common flashpoint for hostilities – whilst AJ and Potter spawned on the west coast.

“Let’s meet up at the south-western most buildings,” suggested Madd, who generally keeps a cool head. “Shaun and I will loot in the area while you guys cut south.”

A notification popped up almost as soon as the match started: a player had gone rogue. This means they killed their team mate. We were reasonably confident this player then immediately exited the map. (This is another popular exploit in the game: by making use of the ‘insurance’ feature that prevents equipment loss on death, it’s possible for players to ‘duplicate’ rare weapons for their friends via team-killing.)

We rejoiced. We had just moved from four against four to four against two. We were going to clean out this map.

“Potter, don’t shoot anyone in the back,” we joked. The guy has form, which is occasionally down to a twitchy trigger finger but more often straight-up griefing. He and AJ have been friends for years and AJ still ribs him about some of the shit he’s pulled. “Very funny,” is all he’ll say.

Madd and I set to looting around the agreed buildings. We still didn’t know exactly where the other two players in the match were so we remained on guard, taking it in turns to cover one another while we rummaged through chests and boxes. Madd played a benevolent and helpful role, as he was much more experienced with the game and was keen to help me advance.

AJ and Potter were making steady progress towards us. They were also looting as they moved but we were aiming to hook up quickly so that we could actually play together. Our game plan was to find and take out the remaining players so that we could scavenge freely.

There was plenty about to tempt us, though, as several players had spent currency in the lobby to increase the amount of loot on the map. We were having a rewarding time and spirits were high.

“We’re almost there,” AJ reported.

“Great,” Madd replied. “We’re just looting the houses.”

I heard the unmistakable sound of approaching footsteps. And then a cry from Potter: “There’s someone in the house!”

Adrenaline spiked. I dropped into a crouch. I snapped my camera back and forth between the visible doors. Where were they? The footsteps were suddenly all around us.

Gunfire erupted with savage immediacy. I saw flashes from a nearby window, and then I could only watch as my character crumpled to the ground.

“I’m down,” I say, into the chaos of panicked chatter and gunfire. I didn’t even get a shot off.

“Got one!” AJ crows.

More gunfire followed. It was all over so fast that it was hard to tell what had just happened. But in the end, Madd and I were both dead. Potter and AJ still lived, and were moving cautiously into the building. I was dumbstruck as I spectated the player who killed me.

“They’re all down,” AJ confirms. “Damn, I got one of them through the window! Did you see that shooting?”

I waited for him and Potter to figure out there were only two bodies in the house. For emblazoned across my screen were the words: you were killed by AJ.

A slightly dramatised tale of an actual match of Vigor, in tribute to AJ’s infamous 2011 article about Potter’s team-killing exploits: “There is no Potter in Team“.

Remnant: From the Ashes is a game with a bad title from a team best known for the Darksiders games*, of which I have played 1.1 of them. I really enjoyed the first Darksiders, but never played far into its sequel, and know very little about last year’s third instalment.

Remnant: From the Ashes is a game I heard about via word of mouth. For some reason a good number of my friends I talk about games with were all curious about it, or at least discussing it. Why might that have been?

Remnant: From the Ashes is a game which, from the first moment I heard about it, was mentioned in the same breath as Dark Souls. Ah, so that is why my friends were discussing it. We just can’t get away from Dark Souls.

Remnant: From the Ashes, a name which I won’t be typing in full any more, because this bit is tiring and isn’t funny anyway, does have a few similarities with Dark Souls. At its core, though, it shares more DNA with DarkSiders.

This means that the combat feels pleasingly “chunky”: ranged attacks land with a wallop and melee attacks slice through mobs of weaker enemies. Even if I didn’t know the provenance of the development team I’d have likened its feel, pace and fluidity to my memories of DarkSiders.

Similarly to that predecessor, Remnant‘s setting is a shattered remnant of human civilization. This time it’s something called The Root rather than the unleashing of Hell’s denizens that has brought this about. I’m approximating aggressively here, but basically some Ents living near Isengard got pissed about rare earth processing runoff polluting everything, just for mobile phones which end up in landfill after a couple of years.

Yeah, our biosphere is so fucked. It’s okay though. There’s a new Apple Watch coming out, and the screen always stays on.

Where Remnant does have some similarities with the oft-mentioned Souls games is in its level of challenge – it’s pretty tough – and its handling of death – which is something you’ll encounter regularly. Remnant has what are basically Souls bonfires, to which you return on death, or can rest at if you choose. When this happens, all slain enemies reappear. Boom. It’s more forgiving than Souls with its meta-progression, but also interestingly crueller, as new areas are reportedly rebalanced to fit a character’s level. You can out-level one area, but not the game.

I’ve now played enough of Remnant to have an idea of how its procedurally generated elements work, and its various imposing bosses. Each campaign is rolled on start, with the broad objectives the same but the exact layout, and which bosses appear where, varied. Where in my own playthrough I fought a dragon, a friend I joined for co-op faced one of those ents I mentioned earlier. Although I recognised much of the environment I explored with him, the way its components fitted together was very different to what I had battled through.

So far I like what I’ve encountered rather a lot. Solo it’s a tense experience; in co-op it’s intense. I recommend it if you have two friends; the worst thing about the game is that it doesn’t have four player co-op.

One proviso for anyone who picks it up based on my recommendation: get through the tutorial as fast as you can, because it doesn’t showcase combat well and the dialogue is impossibly dreary.

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(*A team twice reformed: Vigil Games was not bid upon when developer/publisher THQ went bankrupt in 2013. Most of the team reformed as Crytek USA, a studio that survived about six months before its dissolution during Crytek’s own financial difficulties. Most of the team reformed again, this time as Gunfire Games, who ended up making DarkSiders III anyway.)

Zombies! Tens of thousands of ’em! They’re all over the mall, shuffling about and eating people. And there you are, photojournalist Frank West or one of the less good protagonists, treating them like a minor inconvenience while you chase down the story.

I’ve got a lot of time for the Dead Rising series, all the way back to the 2006 original. Initially intrigued by the technology that could put hundreds of zombies on-screen simultaneously with – for the day – respectable 3D graphics and performance, I found myself won over by game design. Frank, you see, couldn’t be everywhere at once, and the Willamette mall was full of survivors who needed saving, psychopaths (…mmm) who needed stopping, and leads that needed following. The game forced decisions and sacrifice on you, and made it quite clear you couldn’t do everything.

Not the most popular design choice, if you listen to people who shouldn’t be allowed to have opinions. Waaah. I can’t do everything. Whatever. Dead Rising was an intense and memorable experience, one that actively rewarded repeat playthroughs, exploring different paths and routes and choices. It actively reinforced this approach through its meta-progression, with character levels and abilities carried over after death, if you opted to start the story again rather than load your last save. It’s a game about experimentation to learn your environment: where certain items can be found, good routes from A to B, what can be accomplished against the relentlessly ticking clock. Or, if you prefer, a game about ignoring that clock and just dicking around, smacking zombies with parasols and trying on stupid costumes.

The zombies were usually the most minor obstacle, particularly as your skillset expanded to include tricks like hopping on zombies’ heads to easily traverse a horde. They were much harder work when attempting to save or escort survivors, where you often needed to directly fight through a horde – or simply, as Rab Florence memorably put it in an old videoGaiden review, when you’re off doing your thing and you forgot about the zombies.

The series has watered down these elements over time. The focus has shifted further toward zombie-infested locations as toybox, supported with (fun!) additions such as the combination of scavenged objects to make outlandish weaponry. As the focus shifted it the importance of making meaningful decisions declined; there was less need to accept compromises or miss out, or to deeply learn and memorise environments or carefully plan routes. None of this is inherently bad. These are just different design choices. What is a shame is that they are all choices that move away from what makes Dead Rising still a largely unique videogame, and toward the convergence point of so-called “triple-A”* sandbox games.

Dead Rising 4, then. It’s full of collectibles: not just blueprints for combo weapons but also newspapers, podcasts, cloud uploads, cellphones, keys and so on. There’s a few hundred of the sodding things. It’s just shy of full Ubigame, mainly differing in that in order to identify everything on your map, you need to secure a safehouse, then grind out a bunch of randomly occurring survivor-rescue events. This sort of works, because within each of the game’s environments there’s some pleasure in learning them, but the game world is also made up of four not well-connected locations with a main story that awkwardly shuffles you between them. Alongside collectibles, then, there’s another sin of contemporary sandbox games: it is simply too big, meaning too much boring traversal, too much repeated busywork between locations, and insufficient opportunity or encouragement to learn the environments in an interesting way.

DR4 also dispenses with all the character progression elements of the first two games. If you die, you load from a checkpoint. That’s it. Enticement to replay the game only comes in the form of scooping up those collectibles. Yay. Great for the one-run-only crew, I guess. There’s a traditional character build tree rather than the old approach of receiving a random upgrade every level. It’s fine to take that route, but I felt a lot of the options weren’t very interesting, and there was never a sense that my decisions mattered much except where I chose an option that would speed up future progression.

There’s also now a health bar rather than health pips, which basically means you constantly lose health when in proximity to zombies, compared to the calculable neatness of the older system. Again, this is just different. I pay less attention to health as a result. It’s also easier to manage health now. Dead Rising 4, in general, is easier and more fluid to play than its predecessors. In usability terms it’s hugely improved. Health, throwable, melee and ranged weapons are mapped to the d-pad, and choosing the right tool for a situation is much easier than the panicked left-right taps through Dead Rising’s common inventory ever was.

There’s a compromise there, too. It’s an improvement in usability that I imagine also makes the game more accessible, which is a very important consideration. But there is also a loss inherent in it, because poor usability can, intentionally or not, contribute toward a game’s theme. The shift from clumsy tank controls in Resident Evil to the fluid over-the-shoulder action of Resident Evil 4 is perhaps the most famous example, showing how control and interaction can be an integral part in transitioning a sedately-paced and nail-biting horror series into a fluid, intense action series. Not ‘bad’. Not better, or worse. Just different.

But back to Dead Rising 4. Yeah, I enjoyed it, and played its lacklustre story through to the end. In some ways it’s more fun to play than what came before. But in so many others it’s content to imitate competitors in preference to building upon its forebears. And in so doing, it can’t help but lose parts of the identity that once made a Dead Rising game stand out.

A coda, of sorts: I think a lot of people were made very angry by Dead Rising 4 launching alongside a paid DLC that promises to finish the story. Yeah, the main game that you buy for £60 or whatever doesn’t do that. Except that it does, in the sense that you see protagonist Frank West falling into a horde of zombies with no chance of escape. Of course he could escape, but at this point I’m content just to look away and accept Frank is, finally, dead.

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* If you don’t follow the games press, and I can hardly blame you as it’s often dreadful and at best myopic, this terminology is basically adopted from corporate publishers and means “we spent a lot of money on it”. Some chumps are now using the term “quadruple-A”, which basically means “we spent even more money on it”.

You always know that the end of a cycle is coming. First the music builds to an emotional climax. Then it eases through its diminuendo. And then there is a moment, like a sudden building of pressure in the inner ear, when sound seems to rush inwards. If you have a suitable vantage point you might see a star folding in on itself, like a crumpled piece of paper crushed into an ever-tighter ball. And then it explodes.

Knowing that the end of a cycle approaches can be a blessing. Perhaps you have found your way into some secret place, where you can use those precious fore-warned moments to hurriedly root out a few more pieces of the puzzle. Perhaps you’re in a location where you can learn simply by observing what happens right now, at this moment. Or perhaps you have no such pressing business, and this is simply a fine moment to climb to the nearest high point, look toward that dying star, and watch patiently as the fury of untold trillions of tonnes of ejected solar mass boils across space toward you, obliterating all in its path. It can be quite beautiful.

For a game that sees an entire solar system perish in violence and fire every twenty-one minutes, Outer Wilds is a remarkable relaxing experience.

It’s not without its stressful moments. It’s a game of exploration, and that means oftentimes you need to figure out how to get from A to B. Maybe there’s a seemingly obvious route, but for reasons you quickly discover it is not one that is open to you. Perhaps you need to think laterally, or some clue might be found elsewhere, nearby or in some other disparate place.

Most often these moments of stress come when you think you may have cracked one of these little mysteries. You’re deftly moving from A, eating up the distance to B. And then you hear that inward clap of a dying star, and hear the photons rushing past you, and you curse that you didn’t have just one more minute-

You might think moments of stress come when you simply can’t figure out how to get somewhere, or one of the game’s many other mysteries. This rarely happens. There is always something else to try, some other lead to follow, and nowhere takes that long to reach, even if it’s on the far side of the solar system. You will never have more than twenty-one minutes to get anywhere, after all. Sometimes it’s best just to look, and think.

Outer Wilds is a remarkably tight game and its half-dozen or so major destinations are peppered with locations and mysteries, secrets buried here and there and mazes turning in on themselves. The majority of these are interconnected, nodes within an intricate web that promises, once its structure is sufficiently clarified, to reveal the mysteries at the heart of this solar system.

Perhaps it delivers on that promise. I encourage you to take up the mantle of adventure. Explore Outer Wilds, and find out for yourself.